From
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans; The Colonial Experience (Vintage, 1958), pp.
171-184
The Community Enters the University
IN EUROPE a "liberal" education, which would supposedly
liberate a man from the narrow bounds of his time and place, was the property of an
exclusive few. The traditional hallmark of liberal education insofar as there was any in
l8th-century England -- the "Bachelor of Arts" degree -- was under Parliamentary
authority awarded only by Oxford and Cambridge. This ancient clerical-aristocratic
monopoly had, of course, preserved the learned tradition and produced many of the finest
fruits of European thought. But the universities had been hothouses where only certain
kinds of thinking could flourish. Their ancient walls had been doubly confining: they
insulated the inmates from the general community, while they separated people outside from
the community's bookish wisdom.
True, there were signs of change in England in the 17th and
18th centuries. During the l7th century, especially after the Act of Uniformity (1662) had
required all clergymen, college fellows, and schoolmasters to accept everything in the
Book of Common Prayer, noncomformists set up their so-called "dissenting
academies" to train a ministry of their own and to offer higher education to the
children of dissenters. Much of English intellectual life then centered in associations
like the Royal Society of London or was carried on by gentlemen in their country houses.
All this tended to secularize and to broaden the currents of English thought. Still, at
least until the early 19th century, the citadel of English learning remained in Oxford and
Cambridge. Even if Gibbon's familiar picture of an Oxford "steeped in port and
prejudice" is a caricature, lethargy did fall upon the universities during the 18th
century. But because of their ancient tradition, their endowments, their monopoly of
degree-giving, their great and freely growing stock of books (under the licensing acts
each of the two Universities received a copy of every book licensed in England), their
power to publish (for much of the 17th and 18th centuries they were among the few printing
agencies authorized outside London), and their control of avenues of political and
ecclesiastical preferment, they were hard to dislodge from their dominion over English
higher learning. The "democratizing" of English higher learning in the earlier
l9th century did not occur through growth of the "dissenting academies" into
universities; it came about mostly through liberalizing the religious tests for admission
to Oxford or Cambridge, and through accepting more scholarship students. Even today Oxford
and Cambridge link aristocracy and learning in English life.
But many facts, from the very beginning, shaped American life and diffused our collegiate education. Here we will observe only two.
First: The American legal vagueness and the blurring of distinctions
between college and university helped break educational monopolies.
Although the origins of Oxford and Cambridge were shrouded in medieval mists, their
control over higher learning in England came largely from their clear legal monopoly.
Legally speaking, they were undeniably the only English Universities. Oxford in 1571 and
Cambridge in 1573 had received charters of incorporation and held for all England the
exclusive powers to grant degrees; their monopoly was complete until, after a struggle,
the unorthodox London University was founded in 1827.
In England the distinction between "college" and
"university" was always more or less sharp and significant: a college
was primarily a place of residence or of instruction, largely self-governing, but without
the power to give examinations or grant degrees; a university was a
degree-granting institution of learning, usually offering instruction in one of the higher
subjects of Law, Medicine, or Theology in addition to the Seven Liberal Arts and
Philosophy, and possessing special legal authority (first in the form of a papal bull,
later of a Royal or Parliamentary charter). Until the early 19th century, then, there were
many English colleges" but only two "universities," Oxford and Cambridge.
Efforts to found additional degree-granting institutions were repeatedly defeated. For
example, Gresham College, founded in 1548, possessed seven professorships and eventually
became a great center of learning in the form of the Royal Society of London; but it never
became a university. The "dissenting academies," which produced such figures as
Daniel Defoe, Bishop Joseph Butler, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Malthus, survived in the
form of secondary schools ("public" schools) or theological institutions, but
did not acquire the power to grant degrees.
The significance of all this for English life and learning,
while complicated and not easy to define, was nevertheless persistent and pervasive. At
least since the Age of Queen Elizabeth 1, the universities have possessed a social
prestige which has remained undiminished or has even increased, with their academic decay.
By the 18th century the lethargy of Oxford and Cambridge - like the collegiate rowdyism of
American colleges in the early 20th century - had become a standing joke. "From the
toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience," wrote
the great Edward Gibbon of the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, about 1752.
"Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal
anecdotes, and private scandal: their dull and deep potations excused the brisk
intemperance of youth." Few professors performed their proper functions. Between 1725
and 1773, no Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge delivered a lecture, although
one did achieve notice when he killed himself by falling from his horse in a drunk. But
the social amenities were not neglected: Oxford and Cambridge remained fashionable resorts
for noblemen's sons, who sometimes came with their own tutors, servants, and hunting dogs.
Despite all this, the great and ancient universities were far
from dead. Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet), Sir William Blackstone,
and Edward Gibbon, among others, were nourished there. Oxford and Cambridge continued to
be the museum and the citadel Of the nation's high-culture.
How different was provincial America!
Neither the virtues nor the of residence or of instruction, largely self-governing, but
without the vices of these antique monopolies could be transplanted across the
Atlantic. The time-honored English distinction between "college" and
"university," like so many other Old World distinctions, became confused and
even ceased to have meaning in America. For one thing, the legal powers of the different
colonial governments, especially their powers to create corporations and to establish
monopolies, were varied fluid, and uncertain. Nothing was more fertile than this vagueness
of the American legal situation.
According to English law in the colonial period, a group of
individuals ordinarily could not act as a legal unit, own property, sue and be sued, nor
survive the death of individual members. They could not act as a "corporation"
unless they had been granted these privileges by their government. Lord Coke declared the
orthodox English doctrine: "None but the King alone can create or make a
corporation." This was the legal theory. There were a few special exceptions
(corporations "by prescription" or "at the common law," and the Bishop
of Durham's power to create corporations in his "county palatine"), but the
general power to create a corporation remained one of the most closely hedged prerogatives
of government, and many an enterprise hung on the willingness of Crown or Parliament to
grant the artificial immortality of a corporate charter.
Who, if anyone, in the American colonies, possessed this
important power to create corporations? This proved to be a question with many answers.
There were several kinds of colonies --"charter," "royal," and
"proprietary " -- each with a different legal character. The proprietary
charters (of Maine, for example) generally contained a "Bishop of Durham clause"
giving the English Bishop's peculiar regal powers to the proprietor. But the explicit
delegation to a colonial agency of the right to incorporate was seldom found, and this
area became a happy hunting ground for legal metaphysicians. Add to this the many
uncertainties over the relative legal powers of colonial governors versus colonial
legislatures and of all the colonial governments as against the powers in London. On this
uncharted legal terrain many disorderly, inconsistent, and unpredictable institutions
sprouted.
The first American college was set up in a typically American
legal haze. The founding of Harvard is now generally dated from 1636,
when the General Court of Massachusetts appropriated four hundred pounds "towards a
schoale or college," but its legal structure and the extent of its authority could
hardly have been vaguer. Harvard actually granted its first degrees in 1642, although by
that time the college had received from nobody the legal authority to grant a degree; it
had not even been legally incorporated. When the college finally received a charter from
the Massachusetts General Court in 1650, there was still no mention of degrees, perhaps
because of uncertainty over the General Court's own authority to confer the
degree-granting power. The boldest act of Henry Dunster, the first vigorous President of
Harvard College (1640-1654), was to confer any degrees at all. As Samuel Eliot Morison
explains, this was "almost a declaration of independence from King Charles."
Even the legislative charter of 1650 seemed so insecure legally that when Increase Mather
was in England after the Revolution of 1688 he tried, though unsuccessfully, to secure a
special Crown charter. The legal foundations of Harvard, the origins of its authority to
grant degrees, and the question of whether, and in what legal sense, if at all, it is
properly a "college" or a "university"-- all these have remained
uncertain and unresolved into the 20th century. From the beginning, the President and
Fellows exploited this uncertainty, and exercised any convenient powers.
Yale came into being at a time when the legal
foundations of Harvard, which had already been prospering and granting degrees for nearly
sixty years, seemed most shaky. Harvard's special legal problems had been compounded, of
course, by the insecurity of the charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony; obviously no secure
legal rights could be derived from a colonial government which itself might be illegal.
Who could hope to satisfy the General Court, the Governor, and the changing English
government, while respecting ancient forms of English law and duly regarding colonial
convenience? There was the further slippery question of whether a colony which overstepped
its legal authority, say by incorporating a college or university when it actually
possessed no such power, might not be violating its own charter. Such a violation might
invite unfriendly English politicians to challenge the legal existence of the whole
colony. During these years neither Massachusetts Bay nor Connecticut lacked enemies back
home who would have been delighted to seize such an opportunity. "Not knowing what to
doe for fear of overdoing . . . " explained Judge Samuel Sewall and Isaac Addington
in 1701 concerning the Act which they drafted to found Yale, "We on purpose, gave the
Academic as low a Name as we could that it might better stand in wind and weather; nor
daring to incorporate it, lest it should be served with a Writ of Quo-Warranto." With
prudent modesty and ambiguity they decided to call their institution "a collegiate
school." Not until nearly half a century later (1745), after Yale had awarded dozens
of degrees, was it formally incorporated.
The history of colonial colleges is one of the most remarkable
instances of the triumph of legal practice over theory and of the needs of the community
over the abstruse distinctions of professional lawyers. Before the outbreak of the
Revolution, at least nine colonial institutions which would survive into the 20th century
were already granting degrees.
In all of England at this time there were still
only two degree-granting institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, whose ancient monopoly was
still secured by the neatly-wrought distinctions of lawyers. The oldest American colleges
-- Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale -- all must today find the origin of their legal
degree-granting power in what lawyers call "prescription," that is, in the
simple fact that they have been granting a very long time without being successfully
challenged. If the sharp English distinction between a properly-incorporated,
degree-granting monopoly called a "university" and all other types of
institutions had been successfully transplanted here; if a single royal university had
been founded for all the American colonies; or if the power to grant degrees had been
clearly and explicitly forbidden in all the colonies, the history of American higher
education -- and possibly of much else in American culture -- might have been very
different.
Second: Outside control drew the college into the community.
In 17th-century Europe, and certainly in England, the universities and their colleges were
centers for a proud and eminent group of learned men. The medieval clerical tradition had
left them a form of academic self-government which remains the pattern in much of Europe
to this day. The scholars who gathered round the university, controlling its books, its
buildings, its endowments, and its sinecures, were jealous of their powers. To them the
universities seemed very much their own. Whatever may have been the effect of all this on
"academic freedom," one plain result was to make universities independent of the
community and to isolate the university and the community from each other. This is still
expressed in the English antithesis between "town" and "gown."
The Protestant spirit which pervaded the American colonies was of
course congenial to the growth of "lay" (that is non-academic) control. Medieval
universities had been ecclesiastical agencies, and their "self-government" had
followed simply from the autonomy of the clergy. The Protestant Reformation had given
laymen a share in governing their churches; another way of breaking the power of a
priestly class was to admit laymen into the government of universities. "Since the
Reformation from Popery," an American author wrote in 1755, "the Notion of the
Sanctity of Colleges and other Popish Religious Houses has been exploded. . . . The
Intention herein was not to destroy the Colleges or the Universities, and rob the Muses,
but to rescue them from Popish Abuses. . . . in forming new Universities, and Colleges,
the British Nation has perhaps made them a little more pompous, in Compliance with Customs
introduced ... in Popish Times; which Customs being of long Standing they chose to suffer
to continue in them. But the Protestant Princes, and Republicks, and States, in whose
Territories there was no University before, had no Regard to any Popish Usages or Customs
in erecting Colleges, and Universities, and only endowed them with such Privileges and
Powers, and Officers, as were properly School Privileges, Powers and Officers." In
old England, despite Protestantism, university faculties remained entrenched behind their
medieval walls. In America there were no such walls.
As we look back on the story now, it seems clear that
"lay" control of American colleges owed less to anyone's wisdom or foresight
than to sheer necessity and to America's nakedness of institutions. While European
universities in the 17th and 18th centuries had inherited rich lands, buildings,
endowments, governmental appropriations, and intangible resources, the first American
colleges were, as Hofstadter and Metzger point out, brand new "artifacts." They
were founded by small communities; lay boards of control helped marshal their limited
resources and kept the college in touch with the whole community, without whose support
have been no college at all.
In Europe the universities historically had been a kind of guild
of men of clerical learning. No such guild could exist here for the simple reason that
there was no considerable body of learned men. Control of the new institutions inevitably
fell to representatives of the community at large. The learned, eminent, or at least aged
men who led the faculties of European universities could plausibly claim the power to
govern themselves. But at Harvard -- where in 1650, President Henry Dunster had just
turned forty, his treasurer was twenty-six, and the average age of his "faculty"
(then mostly a transient body of students preparing for the ministry) was about
twenty-four -- the staff of the college could hardly expect to receive deference or power
from the surrounding community.
Thus there emerged during the colonial period that pattern of outside
control which would permanently characterize American colleges. In the early government of
Harvard and of William & Mary there were some signs of the growth of
a system of dual control under which the faculty would rule subject to veto by an outside
body. But in neither place did such a system last. As early as 1650, Harvard was plainly
under the control, not of professors, but of magistrates and ministers, and so it
remained. By the mid-18th century, when William & Mary College was flourishing, the
gentry had clearly prevailed over the academics.
The prototype of American college government was actually established
at Yale and at Princeton, where representatives of the community were organized in a
single board of trustees which legally owned and effectively controlled the institution.
These trustees were not members of the faculty; they were ministers, magistrates, lawyers,
physicians, or merchants. American colleges would not be self-governing guilds of the
learned.
Outside control incidentally produced another institution: the
American college president. Under the ancient European system where the
fellows of a college or the faculty of a university governed themselves and were supported
by ancient endowment or clerical livings, there had been no place for such an officer. But
the American system of college government by outsiders created a new need. The trustees
were often absentees, with neither the time nor the inclination to govern; the college
teachers who were on the spot were often youthful and transient. Into this power vacuum
came the college president. He alone represented both the faculty and the public, for he
was a member of the governing board who resided at the college. Technically an employee of
the trustees, he was usually the best informed of them and so became their leader. As the
principal member of the faculty he came to speak for them too. Upon his promotional
ability depended the reputation or even the very existence of the institution. He combined
the academic and the man of business; he was supposed to apply learning to current affairs
and to use business judgment for the world of learning. With no counterpart in the Old
World, he was the living symbol of the breakdown of the cloistered walls.
Higher Education in Place of Higher Learning
IN AMERICA the college became a place concerned more with the diffusion than with the
advancement or perpetuation of learning. "University" education in America
became, for all practical purposes, undergraduate education. No one of the causes of the
dispersion of higher education was unique to America, but all of them together added up to
an overwhelming force against legal monopoly and geographic concentration.
Religious sectarianism and variety.
Each of the three earliest colleges -- Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale -- was
founded to support the established church of its particular colony; and these were the
only colleges until 1745. Not until the mid-18th century -- after the Great Awakening had
aroused religious enthusiasms and sharpened sectarian antagonism, and when prosperity gave
people money enough to send their sons to college and to build college buildings did the
rash of colonial colleges appear. This was what President Ezra Stiles of Yale called
"the College Enthusiasm." While in England the admirable dissenting academies
did not even secure the power to grant degrees, in America the school of every sect
arrogated the dignity of an ancient European university. By the time of the Revolution
nearly every major Christian sect had an institution of its own: New-Side Presbyterians
founded Princeton, revivalist Baptists founded Brown;
Dutch Reformed revivalists founded Rutgers; a Congregational minister
transformed an Indian missionary school into Dartmouth; and Anglicans and
Presbyterians worked together in the founding of King's College (later
Columbia) and the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania).
Each college founded by a sect was another good reason for every
other sect to found its own college in order to save more Americans from the untruths of
its competitors. And all these sectarian colleges were so many good reasons for
secularists to found their own in order to rescue youth from all benighting dogma. Here
was an accelerating movement. Once begun it was not easily stopped; it was only delayed by
hard times during the Revolution. Between 1746 and 1769, twice as many colleges were
founded in the colonies as in the previous hundred years; between 1769 and 1789 twice as
many again as in the preceding twenty years. And so it went. The movement gathered
momentum, and seems hardly yet to have stopped.
Such competition incidentally, had a liberalizing effect. While the
founding sect in each case could dominate, it dared not monopolize its own institution.
Under American conditions the sharpening religious antagonisms of the second half of the
18th century actually produced interdenominational boards of control. While the college
president usually came from the dominant sect, it was commonly necessary to conciliate
hostile sects by including their representatives among the trustees. King's College, which
was an Anglican institution, possessed on its first governing board ministers of four
other denominations; Brown's board, although dominated by Baptists, included a substantial
number of Congregationalists, Anglicans, and Quakers. Of the twenty-four trustees of the
University of Pennsylvania (which had grown out of a nonsectarian academy), six trustees
represented all the principal denominations, including the Roman Catholic.
Among these many new institutions there arose a lively
competition for students, because there were few places in sparsely populated America
where any single sect could furnish the whole student body of a college. Perforce no
American college during the colonial period imposed a religious test on its entering
students. Thus, a nonsectarianism, which was not the product of an abstract theory of
toleration, became an ideal of American higher education. It was typically expressed by
Ezra Stiles who had become President of Yale in 1778 when the college was still suffering
from the narrow-minded orthodoxy of the obstinate Thomas Clap (Rector and President,
1740-1766). Stiles's tolerance helped revive the college. He, of course, admitted his own
conscientious preference for congregationalism, but by that he dared not be governed.
There is so much pure Christianity among all sects of Protestants, that I cheerfully embrace all in my charity. There is so much defect in all that we all need forbearance and mutual condescension. I don't intend to spend my days in the fires of party; at the most I shall resist all claims and endeavors for supremacy or precedency of any sect; for the rest I shall promote peace, harmony. and benevolence.
Provincial America had already begun to find safety in diversity.
Only a decade later the authors of The Federalist (No. 51) observed with prophetic
wisdom that "In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as
that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests,
and in the other in the multiplicity of sects." The proliferation of sects and the
growth of religious enthusiasm in 18th-century America had produced an unpredicted and
unplanned (often an undesired) religious tolerance. Where every sect lacked power to
coerce, they all wisely "chose" to persuade.
Geographic distance and local pride.
The great geographic distances which dissipated religious passion also dissipated the
intellectual passion which might have been focused in one or two centers of higher
learning. There never has been an effective American movement for a national university.
The numerous and diverse American colleges, separated by vast distances, never formed a
self-conscious community of learned men. Even efforts to adopt uniform standards of
college admission or to form a general association of colleges were feeble and
unsuccessful until the 19th century. Organizations like the Phi Beta Kappa Society
(founded in 1776), which aimed at an intercollegiate community of educated men, exerted
slight influence. American colleges were emphatically institutions of the local community.
Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale were designed by and for their particular provinces;
their support came from their own localities.
The primary aim of the American college was not to increase the
continental stock of cultivated men, but rather to supply its particular region with
knowledgeable ministers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and political leaders. While the
university centers of traditional English learning were detached from the great political
and commercial center of London, the early American colleges tended to be at the center of
each colony's affairs. The location of William & Mary at Williamsburg (and the
comparable locations of Brown, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania) where students
like Jefferson could drop in during their spare time to hear the debates of the House of
Burgesses, linked learning and public life. It symbolized both the easy intercourse
between American higher learning and the community as a whole and the identification of
leading men with the special problems of their particular regions.
In England, the leading families sent their sons away to the few
best "public" schools, and afterwards these young gentlemen were gathered if
only for hunting and wassailing - at Oxford and Cambridge. Anyone who could afford it thus
went to a distant, "national" institution. "If he returned to work in his
native place he was no longer quite a native of it," G. Kitson Clark has explained,
"he spoke a different language from most of its inhabitants, had bonds of friendship
which drew his mind away from its borders, and above all had not had with his fellow
townsmen that close association in youth which is perhaps the closest neighbourly bond
there is. Perhaps this helped to impede the development of that vigorous provincial life
which England needed and still needs, and, worse than that, it helped to create a caste,
to emphasize a horizontal social division, at a time of growing wealth and growing social
tensions when a horizontal division was particularly dangerous." In America the basis
of higher education was territorial; this distinction was important, for the diffusion of
American higher education nourished the local roots of a federal union. Mere proximity and
the lower cost of attending college near home seem to have been deciding factors in the
choice of a college by many pre-Revolutionary students in America.
Americans came to believe that no community was complete without
its own college. The famous provisions for an educational land-fund in the Land Ordinance
of 1785 and in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which later became the bases for state
universities, probably had some such motive. Real estate developers in the early 19th
century included plans for colleges in their schemes to attract settlers to new towns.
Social and geographic mobility: the competition for students.
These insecure new institutions were competing for reputation, for financial support,
and-most important of all -- for students. The Colleges of New Jersey and of Rhode Island
(later to be Princeton and Brown), which charged the lowest fees, and Dartmouth, where
some students could work for their expenses, rapidly increased their enrollment. The
College of Philadelphia and King's College, sometimes called "the gentlemen's
colleges," drew the fewest students from afar and had the smallest student bodies.
Nearly all the modern techniques of student recruiting, except
the football scholarship, were used before the end of the colonial era. There were many
examples of the puffing brochure and of alumni acting as recruiting agents. Along with
these came lower standards of admission and graduation and "popular" courses to
attract the students whose tuition fees were desperately needed. "Except in one
neighbouring province," John Trumbull of Connecticut complained in 1773,
"ignorance wanders unmolested at our colleges, examinations are dwindled to meet form
and ceremony, and after four years dozing there, no one is ever refused the honours of a
degree, on account of dulness and insufficiency."
American colleges had already begun to put their money in
impressive buildings, which they could ill afford, rather than in books or faculty
endowments. During the twenty-five years before the Revolution five of the colonial
colleges spent about £15,000 for the erection or remodeling of buildings. Such
expenditures supposedly brought favorable publicity, and hence students. But at the
College of Philadelphia and the College of Rhode Island, these heavy initial costs left
the institutions bankrupt almost before they had begun to operate.
Despite the competition between colleges, higher education was
still not cheap. In the mid-18th century, the combined cost of room, board, and tuition
ranged from about £10 a year (at the College of New Jersey or of Rhode Island), to twice
that sum (at King's College); a wealthy student might spend as much as £50. This was at a
time when a carpenter's annual earnings would have been no more than £50, a college
instructor's about £100, and a prosperous lawyer's only £500. Although an ambitious
parent might secure a loan to educate his son, a college education obviously was not for
the poor: there was not yet a regular or extensive system of scholarships and, except at
Dartmouth, it was uncommon for students to work their way through college. Still,
everything considered, the situation was a great deal better than in England, where a
higher education could not be secured for much less than £100 a year.
One obvious effect of this dispersion and competition of colleges
was an increase in the number, though not in the quality, of college degrees. About
fourteen hundred men graduated from the three colonial colleges in the thirty years before
1747; in the next thirty years the colleges of British North America awarded more than
twice that many bachelor's degrees, about half the increase being due to the newly-founded
colleges. No American who could afford the fee of ten pounds a year for four years could
fail to secure, if he wanted it, the hallmark of a "higher" education. American
colleges were not simply distributing to the many what in England was reserved for the
privileged few; they were issuing an inflated intellectual currency.
The early colonial dispersion established a pattern which was
never broken. From time to time after the Revolution, grandiose hopes were expressed for a
single great institution supported by Congress. It was to be situated in the national
capital, where students of republican sentiment could be drawn from abroad, where the
intellectual resources of the nation could be concentrated, and where local prejudices
might be dissolved. There was such talk even in the Federal Constitutional Convention.
Charles Pinckney's draft expressly gave the Federal legislature the power to establish a
national university at the seat of government, and Madison seems to have favored such a
power. In the showdown the proposal was defeated, either because members believed the
power already had been given by implication or because they considered it undesirable.
George Washington was attracted by the idea of an institution at the nation's capital to
"afford the students an opportunity of attending the debates in Congress, and thereby
becoming more liberally and better acquainted with the principles of law and
government." But the Founding Fathers supported the local institutions which had
sprung up all over the country.
Until nearly the end of the 18th century, the typical American college
consisted of a president (usually a cleric, sometimes the pastor of a neighboring church)
and a few (seldom more than three) tutors who were themselves usually young men studying
for the clergy. There were few "Professors"-- mature men with a full command of
their subject. Under these circumstances the curriculum of American colleges, as distinct
from their institutional framework, inevitably remained traditional. Despite a few notable
exceptions and some influence of the English dissenting academies and the Scottish
universities, American colonial colleges stuck to the curriculum which the tutors had
learned from their tutors and which ultimately could be traced back to the English
universities and their medieval forebears. What distinguished the American college was not
its corpus of knowledge, but how, when, where, and to whom it was communicated.
As colleges became more dispersed, developing their
interdenominationalism and their links with their local communities, they also became less
identified with any particular profession. During the 18th century a decreasing proportion
of American college graduates entered the ministry. By the second half of the 17th century
even Harvard, which had been founded with an ecclesiastical purpose, was drawing many sons
of artisans, tradesmen, and farmers. By the end of the 18th century only about a quarter
of the graduates of all American colleges were becoming clergymen. Meanwhile the lack of
specialized legal and medical training affected those learned professions themselves,
making them depend more on informal apprenticeship.
American colleges that aimed to make good citizens would only
accidentally produce profound or adventuring scholars. The Marquis de Chastellux,
traveling through the country in the 1780's, observed that here the philosopher needed
less to promote educational institutions than to remove obstacles to their progress.
"Leave owls and bats to flutter in the doubtful perspicuity of a feeble
twilight;" he warned with an eye to the English vices, "the American eagle
should fix her eyes upon the sun."
The peculiar promise of American academies lay in their numbers.
From the beginning, American colleges, in contrast with those of England, were more
anxious to spread than to deepen the higher learning. A community of two million
inhabitants or less, dispersed over the long seacoast of a vast continent, would have had
to concentrate its learned minds in some American Athens if they were most effectively to
stimulate one another. But there was no American Athens, and Americans came to value the
intellectual virtues which grew in diffusion: the sense of relevance, the free exchange
between the community's experience and that of its teachers. If by ancient criteria
Americans were less learned, they were shaping new tests of the value of learning. If they
did not know their sacred texts so well, they were opening a thousand windows.
From Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans; The Colonial Experience (Vintage, 1958),
pp. 171-184
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